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Sunday, August 07, 2016

2016 US Presidential Election: Trump campaign pins hopes on Monday's address to the Detroit Economic Club - FURTHER UPDATES

New: Detroit speech offers potential risks, rewards for Donald Trump

Republican nominee Donald Trump heads into today’s remarks to the Detroit Economic Club with a lot on the line: A sober, disciplined policy speech could help him finally move past a recent series of self-inflicted wounds that have rattled his chances of being president.

But a speech like those Trump sometimes gives on the campaign trail — hurling invective, railing against Muslims or Mexicans, long on insults and his personal belief in himself but short on policy specifics — before one of the most esteemed groups of business leaders in the country could help doom him. Read MoreNew: The Party Of Honest Abe Now Stuck With Dishonest Don

Historians see in Trump the biggest liar in presidential politics. Ever. Read More

Hillary Clinton has advanced among women and consolidated support within her party since her nominating convention, while a difficult few weeks have left Donald Trump still struggling on basic ratings from his temperament to his qualifications for office. She leads him by 8 points in a new ABC News/Washington Post poll. Read MoreNew: Trump Woos Sanders Supporters And Snubs Cruz Fans

Fox News and CNN have given plenty of coverage to Donald Trump’s attempt to swing Bernie Sanders voters to his campaign, despite Sanders’ support for the Clinton. At the same time, Trump is insulting Ted Cruz and ignoring the Texas Senator’s backers, at his own electoral peril. Read More

New: Republican officials say Trump could lose to Clinton in key battleground states

Two Republican officials who have been critical of Donald Trump raised new concerns about his ability to win in the key battleground states of Ohio and Arizona. Read More

New: Who Are the Libertarian and Green Party Presidential Candidates?

Most attention in the U.S. presidential race is going to Republican Donald Trump and Democrat Hillary Clinton. But two other candidates – Libertarian Gary Johnson and Jill Stein of the Green Party – are starting to get more attention. They are also rising in popularity in public opinion studies. Read More

New: What If the Green Party Stopped Being Kooky and Started Getting Real?

The Libertarian presidential ticket of former Republican Govs. Gary Johnson of New Mexico and Bill Weld of Massachusetts was born in Nevada, according to the two candidates in an interview with the Reno Gazette-Journal. Read More

Republican and Democratic parties have become poisoned by their monopoly position, Libertarian candidates say, offering alternative. Read More

New: The Latest: Bill Clinton to appear before Asian-Americans

Former President Bill Clinton, appearing on behalf of his wife and Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, will address thousands of Asian-American and Pacific Islander voters at a forum in Las Vegas. Read More

New: Trump to propose deduction on childcare spending: aide

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump will propose allowing parents to deduct childcare spending from U.S. income taxes in an economic policy speech on Monday, a campaign aide said. Read More

New: Poll: Clinton leads Trump by 8

Hillary Clinton leads Donald Trump by 8 percentage points -- doubling her lead from a month ago in the latest ABC News/Washington Post poll. Read More

Two new polls: Clinton’s lead steady at 8-9 points

I’m polled out after last night’s deep dive into the Reuters numbers that Trump fans are buzzing about, but we have to flag the new ones from ABC/WaPo and Morning Consult as points of comparison. WaPo has it 50/42 for Hillary; MC has it 46/37. Both of those results come from registered voters, whereas Reuters’s surprisingly tight race was a poll of likely voters. Apples and oranges? Nope. WaPo also crunched the numbers for likely voters in its data: Hillary 51, Trump 44. Someone’s wrong. And WaPo’s numbers are more in line with the mass of other surveys than Reuters’s are. (Clinton’s lead in the RCP poll average today is 7.0 points, precisely matching her margin in the WaPo poll.) Read More

NC is now a must-win state for Donald Trump

North Carolina is seeing more presidential campaign spending and candidate visits this year in part because it’s a must-win state for Republican Donald Trump. Read More

Donald Trump Could Be Reshaping The Electoral Map — But Not In The Way He Wants

Arizona is very much in play for Hillary Clinton, and Virginia could move out of reach for Trump. Read More

What is more important for Trump is that he himself demonstrates that he can stay on message and not go off on a tangent, much less indulge in the kind of antics for which he has gained a reputation. While Trump can do no wrong in the eyes of his base, other American voters do not see him in the same way.

Obama warns Trump not to spread details of security briefings

President Barack Obama confirmed that Donald Trump will get national security briefings ahead of the November election, but he warned the Republican candidate, whom he has called "unfit" for office, that information from the meetings must be kept secret. Read More

‘No Doubt’ President Obama Is a Muslim, Donald Trump’s New York Campaign Chair Says

Speaking over the phone for an unrelated story, Carl Paladino—the 2010 GOP candidate for governor of New York—abruptly changed subjects and assailed the sitting president and his policies. The Buffalo-based real estate developer and Tea Party activist maintained that Obama, a practicing Christian, has sought to mislead the public about his religious affiliation, but that the citizenry has not fallen for his falsehoods. Read More

Trump looms large in primaries

Three vulnerable Senate Republicans are finding it harder to distance themselves from Donald Trump because they have yet to win their primary elections. Read More

Another prominent Republican ditches support for Trump over mogul’s outrageous remarks, squabbles

Another day, another prominent Republican abandoning his support for Donald Trump. Read More

Third GOP congressman says he won't vote for Donald Trump

Rep. Scott Rigell of Virginia told The New York Times on Friday he will instead vote for Libertarian Party candidate Gary Johnson, the former Republican governor of New Mexico. Read More

Kasich: Trump Jr. called aide to float VP offer

Ohio Gov. John Kasich still isn't ready to support Donald Trump for president -- but he confirmed that one of his aides was contacted about possibly joining the real estate mogul's ticket as his vice president. Read More

Ohio Gov. John Kasich warns it will be ‘really, really difficult’ for Trump to win the key swing state

Ohio Gov. John Kasich on Sunday suggested he’s still not likely to vote for Donald Trump in November and warned that the GOP nominee would find it “really, really difficult” to win the critical Buckeye State. Read More

Beat him like a drum: Donald Trump must not just lose in November; to correct the institutions he’s broken, he must suffer a humiliating defeat

The single worst major party nominee in modern history — a man who has no political core, lies practically every time he speaks and is patently unstable — reached this point because every leader and institution in my party, the Republican Party, has failed again and again to grapple with the grim realities of Trump's impact on the election, the conservative movement and the character of our nation. Read More

Trump Sees a Monster

The two threads of Trump’s speech—Republican unity and Clintonian monstrosity—were closely entwined. This is one of the traps for Republicans who endorse Trump. Some, like Senator Jeff Sessions, just say they love him unabashedly. Others, like Paul Ryan, have backed their Presidential candidate, on the whole, by saying that, although they disagree with him on certain points, Hillary Clinton would be far worse. But as Trump’s policy statements remain outrageous, and his behavior makes his comments about Clinton’s “unhinged” temperament look like a study in projection, balancing that equation demands ever more from G.O.P. politicians. To say that Clinton is more dangerous than Trump requires signing on to a picture of her as a criminal madwoman, and of the political process that produced her nomination as irretrievably corrupted and broken. It leads to diatribes about Benghazi. It means believing in conspiracy theories. Read More

Trump on Clinton: 'She took a short-circuit in the brain'

Donald Trump pumped up his attacks on Hillary Clinton's character Saturday night by suggesting that the former secretary of state is not mentally fit to be president. Read More

Trump is exploiting Clinton's poor choice of words, has stolen a talking point from Clinton who has repeatedly questioned Trump's mental fitness for the office of US president, and is turning it against her, questioning the Democratic Party's presidential candidate's own mental fitness for that office. He is showing himself a master of the propaganda technique that Adolf Hitler described as the "big lie": Repeat an untruth enough times and people will come to believe it, even those spreading the untruth. Clinically, however, the 70-year-old billionaire has exhibited far more psychological symptoms than has Clinton on the campaign trail--erraticness, egotism, explosiveness, distractibility, impaired judgement, impulsivity, irritability, habitual lying, perseveration, and volatility among them. These symptoms are often associated with a physical or neurological condition or a personality disorder. See
the personality disorder test at 4degreez.com for common symptoms of a personality disorder. The symptoms of a personality disorders are aggravated by stress.

Trump portrays Clinton as mentally unfit for the White House

Donald Trump slammed Hillary Clinton as “totally unbalanced” during a rally Saturday night, playing up her mental state a day after Clinton said she “short-circuited.” Read MoreAmerican psycho: Is Donald Trump clinically deranged?

Truly self-made billionaire Michael Bloomberg deftly suggested that Donald Trump is mentally unstable when New York’s former mayor called on Americans to elect a “sane” person as President. Read More

Clinicians would not likely view Trump as "deranged." But they would likely question his ability to exercise good judgment in crisis situations, based upon his personality traits.

This is the fuel that drives the Donald Trump train, as explained by a forensic psychologist
The question that comes to mind for many is what is the allure of Mr. Trump and moreover how is it possible that his supporters seem unwilling to carefully assess the credibility of his declarations, prevarications and deflections. Read More

"In psychology, there is a construct called Cognitive Dissonance. Basically the idea goes that once people make up their minds about something, they become emotionally wedded to a person, idea or plan of action. Despite being confronted with evidence that contradicts a given thought or commitment, people tend to ignore the data at hand rather than modify or change their position." Dr. N. G. Berrill, Daily News

Trump’s campaign has been powered by a populist message that criticizes corporate America for outsourcing jobs, profiting at the expense of everyday workers and buying influence in Washington. The message resonates best with middle-class and working-class voters buffeted by the forces of globalization.

But among the members of the 13-member team of advisers announced on Friday are hedge-fund billionaire John Paulson and investment bankers Steve Feinberg and Andy Beal, as well as a former top steel executive and a former high-ranking U.S. government official.

The reliance on Wall Street executives comes after Trump spent much of his primary campaign lambasting the industry for paying too little in taxes. "The hedge fund guys are getting away with murder,” Trump said in an interview last year. Read More

Five Things We Learned About the Presidential Campaign Last Week

After two conventions and a turbulent week of campaign news, the polls around the race for the White House look very different than they did a month ago. Hillary Clinton is surging and Donald Trump is sinking. While there's still a long time until November, here's a look at the five things we can say about the presidential race right now. Read More

Where Are All the Republican Women?

There are fewer Republican women in Congress now than in 2006. The trend repeats at every level of government. Read More

Questioning If An Election Will Be 'Rigged' Strikes At The Heart Of Democracy

This year, before the ballots are even cast — much less counted — Donald Trump is signaling that he is ready to challenge the presidential election results. Read More

Donald Trump claims the election will be 'rigged' — and many are saying that's preposterous and dangerous

Multiple Republicans told Business Insider Trump's assertion was both ludicrous and dangerous, as Trump would be the first presidential candidate in modern times, possibly ever, to blame an election loss on voter fraud or a rigged election. Read More

Instead, voices who are trusted by Republicans, trusted by Trump's base should be the ones reassuring people about the integrity of the voting system. So is that happening? No. Conservative media is helping Trump spread doubts without a shred of evidence. Here, let me show you how not to interview a candidate about something as serious as this. This is Sean Hannity just handing Trump the mic. Watch. Read More

Is Donald Trump testing his exit strategy?

But Trump's exaggerations are mild compared to those of some of his supporters, such as radio host Alex Jones, who warned that the Obama administration might "cancel the election." And Trump's occasional adviser Roger Stone raised eyebrows by telling Breitbart News that Trump should prepare for a "violent postelection contest."

"I mean civil disobedience, not violence," said Stone, "but it will be a bloodbath. The government will be shut down if they attempt to steal this and swear Hillary in." Read More

Why a Trump loss could still be destructive: Dana Milbank

Some are comforted to know this election ends in three months. But a Trump loss in November -- which seems increasingly likely -- could be only slightly less destructive than a Trump victory. At best, his followers would regard the Clinton administration as illegitimate from Day One and use whatever legal means they can to prevent government from functioning. At worst, they will conclude that their white-male dominated America is lost forever -- and take extra-legal measures to protect themselves. Read More

Radical Islamists may not be the only terrorists against whom the United States needs to protect itself. Timothy McVeigh was not a radical Islamist. Gun owners should be concerned since such talk plays into the hands of those seeking to curtail gun ownership.

The Media’s Obsession With Hillary Clinton’s Emails Is An Insult To All Voters

This tired attempt to revive these scandals in order to create the illusion of a horse race is not serving the public. Read More